This is from a series of guest posts by representatives of the Northwest Building Efficiency Center. This post was written by Gary Nordeen. 

Since the 1930s radiant barriers have shown to be beneficial in reducing cooling loads in structures located in hot climates. A radiant barrier is a material, usually aluminum, which is highly reflective and has a low emissivity. A material with low emissivity absorbs little radiant energy.

Radiant barriers are usually installed in attics to reduce radiant heat gains into the attic that are transferred into the living space. Radiant barriers can be installed on

Figure 1

the underside of roof rafters; laid on top of rafters or trusses prior to installing roof sheathing; laid flat on the ceiling insulation; or “chips” of reflective material can be added to the ceiling insulation.

Proper installation of the radiant barrier is important. Refer to Figure 1 at left, courtesy of Florida Solar Energy Center: 

• Applications #1 or #2 of sheet type radiant barriers are preferred to #3.

• Dust will accumulate if sheet type radiant bareriers are laid over the ceiling insulation.

• Chips or multi-layer radiant barriers are acceptable to be installed at location #3

Recently, there has been an effort to market radiant barriers in the Pacific Northwest with unbelievable claims of energy savings. One radiant barrier company has stated that their product can reduce energy bills by more than 50%. In hot southern climates, where radiant barriers work best, energy savings range from 2% to 10%. Tests by Oak Ridge National Laboratories have shown that the percentage reductions for winter heat losses are lower than those for summer heat gains.

Radiant barrier chips

While radiant barriers can reduce cooling costs, houses in the Pacific Northwest consume more energy for heating than for cooling. Before installing a radiant barrier to reduce heating costs, the following issues should be considered:

At times radiant barriers may actually result in higher heating bills.

When the sun is out on cool winter days, it provides some heating of structures by radiant heat transfer through the roof. A radiant barrier will negate some of these gains.

Radiant barriers may create moisture problems.

If placed on top of the ceiling insulation, a radiant barrier will get cold in the winter and may become a surface where moisture laden air escaping from inside the house may condense. This may cause the ceiling insulation to get wet and become less effective.

Investing in additional insulation and better windows, and stopping air leakage are proven methods to reduce your energy use. Be wary of any salesperson making exorbitant claims about reducing your energy bill. As the old saying goes: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Contact the Northwest Building Efficiency Center at Info@nwBuildings.org if you have questions about energy efficient buildings.

Here at the DJC, there’s been a marked turn around in what stories make it to our most popular list. Namely anything that mentions ”recession” or the “economic slowdown” in some way, shape or form immediately jumps to the top of the list.

With that in mind, I’ve been speaking with people about how business is changing and how they’re shifting gears to survive the current downturn. For green building, most people say the same thing: we’re shifting how we do business a little bit, in products or services, but we’re not making any major changes. We’re going to stick with building green.

But with everyone from architecture firms to consultants tightening their belts and making layoffs, it may be hard to keep moving like nothing has happened. For information on how local firms are coping, read these recent DJC articles: read this one on architecture firms, this one on cities, this one on the contracting communities, this one on job seekers, and this one on commercial real estate.

How about you… how has your business, or the work you do changed? What about your long term business plans? Remember, you can always comment anonymously.

As for me, I’m off to a four-hour course hosted by the Associated General Contractors of Washington on … what else? How to survive a recession.

At one of the Greenbuild session I attended last week, Andy Florance, CEO of CoStar, said the biggest lie in the construction world used to be “my building is under construction.” Now, he said, “that lie has been replaced by my building is LEED certified.”

What is the gold-green standard? Image courtesy Kristopher Lee

That got me thinking about what the highest standard of green building is. Is is LEED platinum? Is it a living building? What about a building that is netzero energy? So I’ve posed the question to you in a new poll at right, and would love to hear what goal you think all buildings should be striving for, if they should be striving for any green goal at all. Or comment below and tell me what standard you think is the best.

But I digress, back to the topic line: do green buildings sell better than their counterparts? According to CoStar, that answer is yes. 

CoStar did a study of the buildings in its entire U.S. database between the first quarter of 2006 and the first quarter of 2008, and based on that information, LEED buildings were 4 percent more occupied than their competitors, renting at $11.33 more per square foot and selling at $171 more per square foot, a 64 percent advantage. Both the occupancy rates and rental amounts climbed - from 4 to 6 percent and from an $11.33 to $18.58 advantage - if you count the past two quarters of this year.

But, Florance cautioned, that information is going to be really tough, if impossible, to measure in the future, thanks to the current state of the economy.

If you want more factual information, read my article in the DJC here that has loads more information on the topic. Or you can see a version of this study dated March here.

How does one of the biggest companies in the U.S. measure and decrease its carbon footprint? Theoretically, it should be a simple process, but when you’ve got 1.7 billion square feet of real estate space worldwide, that’s quite a lofty goal. The difficulty is made even more challenging when you also set a goal of being carbon neutral by 2010. But that’s what CB Richard Ellis did in May of 2007.

I’m here at GreenBuild in Boston, listening to CBRE speakers discuss the topic. Just to get a basic understanding of it takes an hour and a half!

It all began, said speaker Matthew Arnold of Sustainable Finance, when CBRE, a real estate services company, acquired Trammell Crow in 2006, making it a juggernaut of a real estate player. That deal, he said, suddenly brought a host of new questions like what is the diversity makeup of your workforce and what is your company’s sustainability plan? Arnold was hired to help answer those questions and make CBRE an environmental leader. 

In the end, the firm decided to focus on diversifying the workforce and on lowering its carbon footprint. CBRE formed a task force, which came up with a company policy in three months. Arnold said that is incredibly quick, as banks, in comparison, take about a year to do the same work.

In May of 2007, CBRE committed to being carbon neutral as a company by 2010. The commitment refers to the company’s own operation meaning activities directly owned or controlled by CBRE, electricity or heat consumed by CBRE and activities controlled by third parties that are directly linked to CBRE, though it is urging clients to do so as well. Arnold said, “For CBRE, one of the greatest benefits of all this is being able to bring it to its clients.”

Just measuring the company’s current footprint has been a huge challenge, speakers said. It is concentrating on building operations and on employee travel. In January, the company will launch an internal program to measure company travel as no such metrics had previously existed. It is using 2007 as a baseline for building operations.

At 62 percent of CBRE’s market, the U.S. is the biggest fish to catch. In the U.S., CBRE has 2.4 million square feet of space in 162 locations with 18,000 employees, according to Sherada Sullivan of CBRE’s Chicago office.

The company is working on getting more renewable energy and getting more submetering information from building owners. It will occupy only LEED certified buildings when possible in the future.

Sullivan said the company has issued a number of mandates for 2009 including requiring double-sided printers, switching marketing materials from paper to digital and banning water bottles. It is tracking the green office supplies it buys and is trying to raise that number. Sullivan said the Human Resources Department is also looking at options like telecommuting, flexible work weeks and public transit opportunities. 

But none of those actions will get a company the size of CBRE all the way to carbon neutral. Obviously, the final plan in 2010 will require a lot of offsets. Arnold said the firm is working to ensure it gets the most reputable and honest offsets it can.

For more information, visit CBRE’s sustainabilty site here.

Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Academy Award winner, author and oh yeah, former vice president of the U.S.A…. was in town on Friday at a fundraiser for Gov. Chris Gregoire. I was lucky enough to see him speak, along with a room full of Gregoire donors who paid at least $150 for their tickets.

Al Gore spoke in Seattle on Friday

Gore said the U.S. needs to get off foreign oil and onto renewable resources. He said Washington leads the nation and the world in this endeavor. He said we need to re-elect Gregoire. Nothing particularly earth shattering, except for the fact that he was saying it.

Then again, he did describe oil as another sub-prime asset, and said while the current economic conditions are dangerous, there is also opportunity. “It’s the biggest business and jobs opportunity in the history of the world economically.”

And where should those jobs and opportunities be concentrated? WASHINGTON my friends. Gore said he points to Washington as a leader in his lectures, both nationally and globally.

But the oil and coal age won’t end when we run out of oil, Gore said. Instead, it will end when “we come to our senses” and develop energy infrastructure based on solar and wind sources.

It also turns out he has a long relationship with this state and greatly admires it - heck, he’s climbed Mt. Rainier, Christmas shopped here, fished here and is oldskool buddies with Rep. Norm Dicks. In fact, none of this state’s flatterers mean it as much as he does, according to Gore. 

As a speaker, Gore was sporadically funny, connecting with the audience and drawing huge rounds of applause that drowned out his microphoned voice. Then again, the audience wasn’t exactly impartial. It’s also obvious that Gore speaks pretty frequently and he is so comfortable in the post he doesn’t really need to write a speech anymore, he can just talk.

Unfortunately for me, Gore never mentioned green buildings. He mentioned solar and wind energy, but that’s the closest it came to making my heart go pitter-patter. For substantive green building discussions, I guess I’ll have to stick with our local lectures. At least there’s lot’s to choose from!

If you want more information on what he spoke about, the Northwest Progressive Institute Blog has a nice rundown. Xconomy Seattle also has a nice post about what else Gore was doing in our great city here.

Do you think the current economic crisis will affect green buildings? Answer my poll at right, if you haven’t already.

READERS, if you like this post, subscribe to a free reader to make sure you are alerted whenever there’s a new post to the Green Building Blog. Just click on the ‘Subscribe in a Reader’ link at right!

Green building has many elephants in the room and thanks to the current state of the economy, this is a big one: will green building suffer because of the current state of the economy?

The problem with trying to answer this question is that it all comes down to

The road to market-wide green buildings?

definitions: what do you consider to be a green building? Does it need to be certified by a third party operation? Are you talking about all markets - commercial, homes, mixed use etc.?

Assuming you can answer the definition question, another one immediately presents itself: how do we measure how green buildings are doing? Is there any way to realistically measure the buildings that are putting off plans, and then how green building is a factor in that?

I cannot answer these questions without doing a lot of research with time I frankly don’t have. But in the end, it seems like there are two groups out there:

1. The group that thinks yes, green buildings will take a hit because they’re more expensive.

and

2. The group that thinks green buildings are actually more valuable because they cut down on energy use and electricity bills, and will hold their value better in future markets.

Which group do you belong to? Comment on my new poll at right, or tell me more below, to let me know!

P.S. For great coverage about how the market is affecting the Puget Sound region, check out the DJC. On Oct. 13, we ran a story from local contractor’s perspectives. On Oct. 14, we run a story on local architecture and engineering firm’s perspectives. Don’t miss them!

Wired magazine’s Wired Science blog had a great post recently about Solyndra, a three-year old company that makes very out of the ordinary solar panels indeed. Instead of the typical panel we know and love (or hate) that are flat and mounted up towards the sun, these solar cells are cylindrical and look like a long tube. They also contain no silicon.

The panels are marketed towards offices. According to Solyndra’s Web site, wind blows through the tubes so no rooftop anchoring is required, making them a cost-effective business solar solution (wow, what a mouthful!) So far, the company says it has $1.2 billion in multi-year contracts in Europe and the U.S.

 For more information, see the Wired  post here. Or visit the New York Times here.

We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto!

Though a necessary part of life, we don’t do much talking about toilets. However, in the last week I’ve been hearing a lot about toilet efficiency, toilet brands and how to test them.

This product could be yours!

So when I got a press release for the Brondell Swash Ecoseat, I wasn’t surprised but rather perplexed. The Ecoseat bills itself as an ”ecofriendly” way to save trees. Rather than flushing 100,000,000 rolls of toilet paper worldwide per day representing 55 million trees each year, the press release says, you can do simply buy this product and wipe all that eco-guilt out of your life.

The product is a battery operated “dual wand seat with an integrated bidet which features adjustable water pressure (for a refreshing feminine and posterior wash) and push button controls.” In other words, it uses water rather than paper to clean you off.

Is it really environmentally friendly or are the company’s claims eco greenwash? In June, the Washington Post carried a story by Blaine Harden about how energy use in Japan is soaring and how one major factor is high tech toilets that “warm one’s bottom, whisk away odors with built-in fans and play water noises.” They also play relaxation music like “Ave Maria.” But they also consume energy at an alarming rate because they are always plugged in. The article says people are also using the toilet more, because it’s a comfortable space. Some even get addicted to it.

Here in the U.S, old fashioned toilets are getting more and more water efficient.

This is what your toilet would look like

Recently at a water conference i attended, Water Expert Roger Van Gelder told attendees that new super efficient systems using 1.0 gallons per flush or less can be just as strong or stronger than older models that used seven gallons. The water use of a toilet doesn’t make it a better toilet and stronger toilet, he said, instead it’s the product’s systems that do the job.

But with all toilets, he said, you have to actually test the toilets to see how well they work. “Anything that you get, you can’t really believe what it says on the box.” 

So how about believing the Swash Ecoseat’s box. It is battery operated so it doesn’t plug into the wall. But it still uses energy. What do you think readers, is it greenwash or a green solution?

I’ve spent the last two days at two very different but very intersting conferences. The first, King County’s Green in Place: From Policy to Practice conference, featured Gary Lawrence as the keynote speaker and during his talk (discussed at length in an article in the Sept. 19 DJC.. read it if you’re at all intersted in ths subject) he said something a little out of the typical routine:

 “If you’re involved in sustainable design and (not) addressing issues of equity and justice, you’re not involved in sustainability.”

Arup's Treasure Island project in San Francisco

He defined social equity or social justice as considering the impact your building and designing choices have on other humans. So instead of putting on that green roof, you consider how the extra steel needed to reinforce the roof will affect the lives of the people who will mine the steel. Basically you look at your choices from an all inclusive roundabout way.

It takes a lot of thinking. And for those people just entering into green building or sustainable design, it might be too much work to add on (at the beginning stage of the game).

But intrinsically, is Lawrence right? Can you, Mr. Architect or Ms. City Planner really call your work sustainable if you don’t consider all the different people your choice will affect both in the past and in the future? Or is it just too much to handle?

The question in itself is fascinating, and one that I, by my lonesome, cannot answer. What do you think?

P.S. (Lawrence’s resume could make most people’s eyes widen. He has been a former DPD planning director, UW professor, adivsor to the Clinton Administration’s Council on Sustainable Development, the United Nation’s Habitat II, the Brazilian President’s Office, the British Prime Minister’s Office, not to mention currently running Arup’s sustainable urban development globally.)

For more information, it turns out King County Executive Ron Sims has already tapped this topic in a keynote talk of his own. Read the press release. I don’t know much about the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, but it has some interesting definitions here.

Over the last few days two articles in New York Times affiliated newspapers caught my eye:

Spanish Region Limits Golf Development  by Kevin Brass in the International Herald Tribune is about how the government in Andalusia in “golf-happy Spain” has passed a new law restricting the development of golf courses. One of the golf courses there is pictured at right. The regulations limit how many houses a developer can build around a course and require new courses to use recycled water for irrigation.  It’s an interesting story about the relationship between a crashing housing market, “thirsty” golf courses in an area prone to droughts, and houses.

Plus, it’s always amazing to me how controversial golf courses can be. Doubt me? Read Alex Shoumatoff’s The Thistle and the Bee from Vanity Fair’s green issue.

The New Trophy Home, Small and Ecological by Felicity Barringer in the New York Times is basically a total overview of LEED for homes.

The Hollywood house profiled in the article is LEED platinum and $2.8 million. Kelly Meyer, one of the people behind the house, points out green houses can be stylish, while the article compares LEED platinum to Prada… but not all LEED homes, platinum or not, cost $2.8 million. Sheesh. Some are just Besty Johnson or Eddie Bauer. Though they do tend to be a tad more expensive…  locally Pride + Johnson’s Ashworth Cottages (also platinum and pictured below) cost between $739,000 and $950,000. Read my story on that here.

Barringer highlights LEED for its certification process, but doesn’t mention other programs, like Energy Star homes , are third party certified too. And while describing what third party certification is and how much it costs, there is no mention of why it is needed (to prove that everything works like it says it does) or where some people say it falls short (verifiers don’t actually see buildings, just read and verify the documents).

It barely touches on LEED as a marketing and selling tool… Like it or not, marketing is why lots and lots of people are doing LEED projects. For more on this, read the Building Seattle Green blog’s overview of a study that tackles that topic here.

I’m also interested in why the USGBC isn’t asked to comment. Then again looking at a topic like this in two pages seems momentous to me to begin with. And the reporter did cover a lot of ground. Judge for yourself.

Happy reading everyone!